Skynet CPU Back On Track

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Believing he can succeed where his father failed, Danny Dyson has set out to rebuild Cyberdyne Systems and the neural-net processor his father helped develop.

Although only sixteen, child prodigy Dyson said he believed he could recreate the Skynet CPU his father developed in 1997 from a series of files his father had backed up for his personal use.

Danny Dyson’s Skynet processor will attempt to emulate the cognitive processes used by human beings, specifically Dyson’s model and programming guru, Apple Computer chief executive Steve Jobs. Dyson said he is developing the Skynet platform to serve as the foundation of both mainframe-like thinking machines as well as ambulatory cyborgs and smaller single-purpose robots.

Dyson’s past, unfortunately, is clouded in violence. Danny Dyson’s father, Miles Dyson, had worked as a top researcher for Cyberdyne, based in Long Beach, Calif. In 1997, the Dysons were assaulted in their family home by three individuals who claimed they were from the future, and that Miles Dyson would design the weapon that would doom mankind.

According to notes left after his death, Miles Dyson was especially struck by the leader of the group, a man Dyson described as eerily reminiscent of the work Dyson himself was conducting in cybernetic computing. Shaken, Dyson later agreed to destroy the Cyberdyne offices and its files, committing suicide in a fiery explosion that incinerated the building’s contents. Analysts said at the time that the Skynet project was finished.

“It changed me,” Danny Dyson says now. “One minute it was just an ordinary Tuesday nightthe next it was this nightmare of crashing glass and noise. This woman runs screaming into the house, screaming about how it’s all my dad’s fault and how he was going to kill him. That’s all she kept saying: ‘It’s all your fault. It’s all your fault.’ Then this big white guy and this kid kick in the front door.

“I don’t remember the conversation they hadthey sent me away to play,” Dyson continued. “But whatever the man said shook Dad. It terrified him. It scared me, too, to see Dad so frightened. And then boom.”

Although Cyberdyne was founded as a 1950’s era defense contractor, the company quickly refocused itself when Miles Dyson discovered technology so revolutionary that the scientist secretly believed it was from the future. Psychologists familiar with the case claimed that the breakthrough was both an intellectual milestone as well as the beginning of a lethal form of dementia.

“What we as society often term ‘visionary’ individuals often suffer from a misguided sense that they can change the world,” said Dr. Molly Sparks, chairwoman of the clinical psychology department at the University of Iowa. “Many associate themselves with technology: Jim Clark, Jerry Sanders, John Dvorak. But more often than not, history proves them wrong.”

Without his father to guide his work, the younger Dyson has turned to a new mentor: Jobs. Dyson said he discovered early CAD drawings of the Skynet CPU on an Iomega Zip disk his father never used, and won the reclusive Jobs over with a promise that the CPU would double Apple’s market share to 4 percent.

“Steve represents everything that I want Skynet to be: brilliant, focused, unrelenting, someone who’s not afraid to break a few heads if it means a better product,” Dyson said. “When Apple launched its ‘Think Different’ campaign, I thought, ‘That’s Skynet’.”

Details of the Skynet CPU will remain confidential until the chip is manufactured, possibly by Motorola. However, the foundry’s apparent inability to manufacture the chip has left some at Cyberdyne wondering if Motorola should remove its human workers and replace them with automated assembly lines.

Neural networks use a series of parallel instruction chains that run at great speeds, remapping themselves to emulate the human brain.

“I believe the Skynet CPU will serve as the foundation to enable the next level of computingevolution,” Jobs said in a statement. “Neural-net computing is far, far beyond what our competitors have achieved. And it should finally put that goddamn ‘megahertz myth’ to rest, too.”

Apple engineers have used a prototype of the Skynet CPU to render a Photoshop image five million times faster than the Pentium 4, sources said.

Dyson said Jobs is a whiz at design, too. “Did you ever wonder why OS X is so bug-free, and why Apple users never report viruses?” Dyson said. “That was Steve’s doing. He wrote two programs: ‘Hunter/Killer’ and ‘Terminator’, and the problems went away. I’m trying to keep that same spirit in Skynet.”

When asked if the new CPU could replicate Jobs’ emotions as well as thought processes, Dyson replied, “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

The market for neural-net processors has already attracted the eye of others in the industry. Dyson said he has been invited to show off the Skynet CPU at the DEMO show in Arizona, where Sun Microsystems will demonstrate a Java virtual machine running on the new processor. GartnerGroup already predicts the market for neural-net processors will top $8 billion by 2005, barring any unforeseen calamities.

Don’t expect a Skynet-based PC, however. “I have to confess, it’s a personal thing,” Dyson said. “The way Bill Gates does business–it’s just so inhuman.”